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How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940S

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How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940S 148 bert hansen Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s BERT HANSEN summary: When comic books rose to mass popularity in the early 1940s, one segment of the industry specialized in “true adventures,” with stories about real people from the past and the present—in contrast to competing books that offered fantasy, science fiction, superheroes, detectives and crime, funny people, or funny animals. This study examines the figures from both medical history and twentieth-century medicine who were portrayed as heroes and role models in these comic books: first, to call attention to this very popular, if unknown, genre of medical history, and second, to illustrate how medical history was used at that time to popularize scientific and medical ideas, to celebrate the achievements of medical research, to encourage medical science as a career choice, and to show medicine as a humane and noble enterprise. The study explains how these medical history stories were situated in American popular culture more gener- ally, and how the graphic power of comic books successfully conveyed both values and information while also telling a good story. Attention to this colorful genre of popular medical history enriches our picture of the mid-twentieth- century public’s enthusiasm for medical progress. keywords: cartoons, comic books, medical history, medical heroes, popular culture, Golden Age, scientific method, medical research Presentations of this research were made at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Bethesda, Md., on 21 May 2000, and at Queens University, Kingston, Ont., on 10 October 2000. The research has been supported in part by the Mildred and George Weissman School of Arts and Sciences of Baruch College and by the PSC-CUNY Research Awards Program of The City University of New York. For com- ments on drafts, I am grateful to Roslyn Bernstein, Jacalyn Duffin, Deborah Erickson, Janet Golden, William H. Helfand, Robin Marantz Henig, Howard Markel, Edward T. Morman, and Michael Rhode. For suggestions and assistance with research materials, I wish to acknowledge the very helpful staff of Special Collections at the Michigan State University Libraries and to thank David Gaudette, Ron Goulart, Paul Jackson, Jay Maeder, Michael Sappol, Randall W. Scott, Lynn Sherman, Maggie Thompson, Amy Van Natter, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. 148 Bull. Hist. Med., 2004, 78: 148–191 American Comic Books and Medical Heroes 149 That the middle decades of the twentieth century were a “golden age” for American medicine has been widely recognized. Doctors’ high social status, the public’s confidence in miracle cures, the profession’s credibil- ity, and an expansion of funding for medical research characterized this era, especially in contrast to new discontents that followed.1 Far less noticed is the fact that this was also a “golden age” for medical history, at least among the general public. Beginning in the 1920s, medical history images and stories came to be widely disseminated in popular books and magazines, commemorations, Hollywood films, children’s literature, ra- dio dramas, schoolbooks, corporate advertising, and the then-brand-new genre of comic books. Through countless renditions of medical history circulating in popular culture, not only those with college educations but also so-called general readers, their children, and their less-educated fellow citizens acquired a familiarity with medical figures of the past. By a coincidence of language, 1938 to 1945 is also designated the “golden age” of comic books, the period when superhero comics first appeared and the industry achieved explosive growth.2 If 1940s comic books constituted only one genre among several that published medical history, they are nevertheless important—if only by virtue of their very large circulation numbers. And they have been overlooked.3 Medical 1. John C. Burnham, “American Medicine’s Golden Age: What Happened to It?” Science, 1982, 215: 1474–79. Paramount in developing and popularizing the image was Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For a chal- lenge to this view’s hegemony, see Rosemary A. Stevens, “Public Roles for the Medical Profession in the United States: Beyond Theories of Decline and Fall,” Milbank Quart., 2001, 79: 327–53. Mark Schlesinger, “A Loss of Faith: The Sources of Reduced Political Legitimacy for the American Medical Profession,” ibid., 2002, 80: 185–235, provides refer- ences to a substantial secondary literature on the question. 2. More precisely, the comic books of the Golden Age were published from June 1938 through 1945. The second period of novelty and success, which ran from September 1956 though 1969, is designated the “Silver Age,” while “Modern Age” comics are those from 1980 to the present. To fill the gaps around the main eras, other terms are used: Pre- Golden Age, Post-Golden Age, Pre-Silver Age, Post-Silver Age. See Robert M. Overstreet, The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, published annually; I have used the 26th ed. for 1996– 97 (New York: Avon Books, 1996), pp. A92–A95. 3. The importance of looking at comic books for understanding science in popular culture was noted by Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey in “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” Hist. Sci., 1994, 32: 237–67. The major examination of science in American comic books is the 1976 article by George Basalla discussed below in the section on the historiog- raphy of popular science (see n. 92). There have been no studies of medicine or health in American comic books; there is a study for France: Philippe Videlier and Piérine Piras, La santé dans les bandes dessinées (Paris: Frison-Roche, 1992). 150 bert hansen history stories in children’s comic books were engaging, upbeat, and instructive. Furthermore, by placing key events of contemporary medi- cine within a long historic tradition, they helped to reinforce the rising status of the American medical profession during the war and in the postwar era. They also actively promoted medical philanthropy and biological research. The medical history stories in comic books were thoroughly integrated into the mix of true-adventure stories. For ex- ample, on a typical cover, the pellagra research of “famine fighter Dr. Joseph Goldberger” was matched with the heroism of Leathernecks on Guadalcanal and the military leadership of General Eisenhower.4 These books and the stories they contained were remarkably popular. Huge numbers of teenagers had regular encounters with Louis Pasteur, Theobald Smith, Florence Nightingale, or Joseph Goldberger outside their schoolbooks. Books like True Comics, Real Heroes, and Real Life Comics were on the newsstand competing for young readers with Superman, Batman, and many other titles (see Fig. 1). If these true-adventure books sold in smaller numbers than those of the superheroes, they still sold in the hundreds of thousands each month. But numbers were not the whole story—comic books played a major role in the experience of American children and young adults from the late 1930s into the 1950s.5 4. Cover by unknown artist, Real Life Comics, no. 12 (July 1943). The unsigned story is “Famine Fighter: Dr. Joseph Goldberger,” on pp. 15–22. (Among the comic books cited in this article, very few acknowledged by name the writers and the artists; they are cited herein if known, but the citation of stories generally begins with the title. In this era, volume numbers were used rarely and not consistently, but the issue number is essential and appears here immediately after the magazine title, followed by cover date of the issue and pagination of the story. Note that for comic books, the date as given on a cover or copyright page was conventional and must not be taken as a historically accurate date of publication; issues usually appeared on the newsstand one to several months earlier than the cover date.) The comic books examined herein have not been reprinted and cannot be found in many libraries; about half are held in the collection of Michigan State University Libraries, and almost all are in the author’s collection. A modest number of issues of two book titles are accessible online from Michigan State University Libraries: as of June 2003, color scans for all the pages in three issues of Real Heroes and a much larger run of True Comics are available at http://digital.lib.msu.edu/onlinecolls/ (accessed 9 November 2003). 5. “For at least a quarter century, the comic book was the dominant element in the culture of American children—they read them, re-read them, collected them, traded them. During the same period, especially during World War II, when servicemen with limited off- duty time hungered for cheap and quickly readable material, it achieved great (though less publicized) popularity as reading matter for adults” (Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, introduction to All in Color for a Dime, ed. idem [New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1970], p. 11). American Comic Books and Medical Heroes 151 Fig. 1. “Comicland,” photographer unknown. Copyright 1948 Newsdealer Magazine, Inc. 152 bert hansen In this article I will examine the medical history stories in 1940s comic books with several goals in view. I will document a significant corpus of medical stories in popular culture, and will illustrate the images and values conveyed in these stories of medical heroes. I will examine how the stories contributed to science education, and will suggest that these engaging, widely disseminated images of doctors and medical scientists may have encouraged medically oriented career choices among the young readers. The heroic narratives themselves will be explored after sections setting out the wider context of popular medical history of the 1930s and 1940s and orienting readers to the characteristic aesthetics of comics and the history of comic book publishing.
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